Eva Helene Pade Contemporary artists to follow if you like Cecily Brown

By Sadaf Padder

Eva Helene Pade pays close attention to the female figure. The rising Danish painter grounds her nude figures in scenes animated by a luminous palette. Subtle tonal modulation and deep shadows draw intimate clusters of characters into focus against a softly diffused atmosphere.

Her process recalls Brown’s practice of working without a predetermined image, so that forms emerge through revision and accumulation. As Brown has noted, “I often lay down a wash in one colour and don’t have a clear image in mind of where I am going. I start pushing paint around until forms suggest themselves.” Pade noted this influence in an interview with Artsy: “Brown has a distinctive way of distorting the figurative into abstraction, working precisely in the gaps where an image is both forming and dissolving.”

Pade is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac—the youngest artist on the gallery’s roster. Her 2025 solo exhibition “Søgelys” presented an exploration of light, atmosphere, and presence.